Confusion Between Similar Languages

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księżycowy
Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby księżycowy » 2017-04-25, 13:01

I had just gotten up, so forgive my misspelling. :P

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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Babbsagg » 2017-04-25, 18:09

I just learned the correct spelling of cucumber. Then said it myself and pronounced the end of the word Norwegian (I started some Norwegian online lessons yesterday). I also started the Swedish lessons earlier this day. If I mess up English already, I think it's a terrible idea to try Norwegian and Swedish in parallel. I guess Swedish has to rest for the time being.

edit: good grief, not only do I have to come to grips with pitch accents, I also just learned that tone 1 in some dialects is like tone 2 in others. FML
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby linguoboy » 2017-04-25, 18:58

Babbsagg wrote:edit: good grief, not only do I have to come to grips with pitch accents, I also just learned that tone 1 in some dialects is like tone 2 in others. FML

Now you know why when I did try learning Swedish, I concentrated on Finland Swedish. :D
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Babbsagg » 2017-04-25, 19:48

Makes a lot of sense actually. Well I think I'll learn north Norwegian.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby linguoboy » 2017-04-25, 20:24

Back to the OT, I have lots of problems with Catalan infiltrating my Spanish, which is worse than the other way round since virtually all Catalan-speakers speak Spanish but relatively few Spanish-speakers know any Catalan. This particularly seems to happen when I'm texting a friend of mine from Argentina. Just yesterday, I was telling him something about my stepmother and I stopped myself before typing madrastra because we were taught in Catalan class that it's deprecated in contemporary Catalan where the more usual term is segona mare ("second mother"). I almost typed "segona mare" but I caught myself in time and typed "segunda madre" instead. Then I needed to tell him that she broke her knee, but I could only think of the Catalan word genoll, which I successfully castilianised as hinojo. But in addition to meaning "knee", hinojo is also "fennell" (rodilla is the usual word for "knee" in contemporary Spanish) so I don't know if he understood what I meant or not.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby mōdgethanc » 2017-04-26, 0:33

Johanna wrote:Before those, <sk> defaults to /ʂ/

I thought that was /ʃ/, and /ʂ/ was <rs>.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Osias » 2017-04-26, 1:28

linguoboy wrote:Back to the OT, I have lots of problems with Catalan infiltrating my Spanish, which is worse than the other way round since virtually all Catalan-speakers speak Spanish but relatively few Spanish-speakers know any Catalan. This particularly seems to happen when I'm texting a friend of mine from Argentina. Just yesterday, I was telling him something about my stepmother and I stopped myself before typing madrastra because we were taught in Catalan class that it's deprecated in contemporary Catalan where the more usual term is segona mare ("second mother"). I almost typed "segona mare" but I caught myself in time and typed "segunda madre" instead. Then I needed to tell him that she broke her knee, but I could only think of the Catalan word genoll, which I successfully castilianised as hinojo. But in addition to meaning "knee", hinojo is also "fennell" (rodilla is the usual word for "knee" in contemporary Spanish) so I don't know if he understood what I meant or not.
:shock: :D
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby הענט » 2017-04-26, 8:24

linguoboy wrote:Back to the OT, I have lots of problems with Catalan infiltrating my Spanish, which is worse than the other way round since virtually all Catalan-speakers speak Spanish but relatively few Spanish-speakers know any Catalan. This particularly seems to happen when I'm texting a friend of mine from Argentina. Just yesterday, I was telling him something about my stepmother and I stopped myself before typing madrastra because we were taught in Catalan class that it's deprecated in contemporary Catalan where the more usual term is segona mare ("second mother"). I almost typed "segona mare" but I caught myself in time and typed "segunda madre" instead. Then I needed to tell him that she broke her knee, but I could only think of the Catalan word genoll, which I successfully castilianised as hinojo. But in addition to meaning "knee", hinojo is also "fennell" (rodilla is the usual word for "knee" in contemporary Spanish) so I don't know if he understood what I meant or not.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Michael » 2017-04-26, 8:26

linguoboy wrote:Back to the OT, I have lots of problems with Catalan infiltrating my Spanish, which is worse than the other way round since virtually all Catalan-speakers speak Spanish but relatively few Spanish-speakers know any Catalan.

Is that to say that you speak Catalan more often than Spanish?
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby linguoboy » 2017-04-26, 14:21

Michael wrote:
linguoboy wrote:Back to the OT, I have lots of problems with Catalan infiltrating my Spanish, which is worse than the other way round since virtually all Catalan-speakers speak Spanish but relatively few Spanish-speakers know any Catalan.

Is that to say that you speak Catalan more often than Spanish?

No, it's that I studied Catalan more intensively than I've ever studied Spanish. (A couple years ago I came to the sad realisation that I finally read Spanish better than Catalan because I have so much more exposure to it.)
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby dEhiN » 2017-04-28, 9:11

linguoboy wrote:
Michael wrote:
linguoboy wrote:Back to the OT, I have lots of problems with Catalan infiltrating my Spanish, which is worse than the other way round since virtually all Catalan-speakers speak Spanish but relatively few Spanish-speakers know any Catalan.

Is that to say that you speak Catalan more often than Spanish?

No, it's that I studied Catalan more intensively than I've ever studied Spanish. (A couple years ago I came to the sad realisation that I finally read Spanish better than Catalan because I have so much more exposure to it.)

I find sometimes it's not even a question of which language I speak/know more, but which language I was recently using. There are many times where I'm speaking to my parents in a mix of English and Tamil. It's mostly English but with 5% of the words in the sentence being in Tamil because those (Tamil words) are ones that I've known for a long time and used so much it's become second nature for me to use with my parents. But sometimes I go to say one of these Tamil words and I almost say the French equivalent because earlier that day or the day before I was practicing my French.

Back on-topic, I recently had a confusing moment between Spanish and Portuguese. I was text-chatting with someone on Skype using my phone, and this person knows a lot of Spanish as well as some French and Portuguese. So I used the French verb se manquer, but this person didn't know the verb. I explained what it meant and wanted to add that it's used like gustarse in Spanish. Except I kept thinking gostar (de) in Portuguese. This was all happening on my phone, so when I typed gostar the keyboard app I use, which normally highlights the closest word to what I'm typing as part of auto-prediction, didn't highlight anything. That told me gostar was wrong but it took me a good 3-5 minutes before I remembered the vowel was u and not o! I also confused Spanish and French in that same interaction since when I finally typed out what I wanted to add, I wrote "it's like se gustar in Spanish", completely forgetting that Spanish affixes the pronoun to the end of the infinitive verb!
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-04-28, 18:42

dEhiN wrote:There are many times where I'm speaking to my parents in a mix of English and Tamil. It's mostly English but with 5% of the words in the sentence being in Tamil because those (Tamil words) are ones that I've known for a long time and used so much it's become second nature for me to use with my parents.

Do you and your parents use something like [ˈt͡ʃaːja] to mean 'tea'?
So I used the French verb se manquer, but this person didn't know the verb. I explained what it meant and wanted to add that it's used like gustarse in Spanish.

It's just manquer and gustar. They're not reflexive; it's just that the subject and object are switched around from the more or less equivalent expressions in English. :)

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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Vlürch » 2017-04-30, 13:41

Sasabasa wrote:The same goes for Tukish, Azeri, Turkmen etc.

If it sounds like Turkish or Azeri but has /θ/ and /ð/, it's Turkmen.
If it sounds like Tatar or Kazakh but has /θ/ and /ð/, it's Bashkir.
If it sounds like Turkish or Kazakh without vowel harmony, it's Uyghur.
If it sounds like Kazakh and you can only barely tell it isn't, it's Karakalpak.
If it sounds like Kazakh but is much stiffer and more rounded, it's Kyrgyz.
If it sounds like Kyrgyz but is not as sibilant or rounded, it's Tuvan.
If it sounds like Kyrgyz or Tuvan but is even stiffer and dinosaurier, it's Altai.
If it sounds like the most cute uguu~ Turkic language ever, it's Sakha/Yakut.
If it sounds like any Turkic language but every vowel is /o/, it's Uzbek. :P

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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Johanna » 2017-04-30, 21:25

mōdgethanc wrote:
Johanna wrote:Before those, <sk> defaults to /ʂ/

I thought that was /ʃ/, and /ʂ/ was <rs>.

Yeah, now when you mention it, it's usually transcribed like that.

The thing is, the underlying phoneme that <rs> represents is really /rs/ since the dialects that have the uvular trill and/or fricative for /r/ don't assimilate this cluster. And it's not like you need to keep it apart from /ʃ/ anyway since they only very seldom occur in the same position, at least in native words, and I don't think there are any minimal pairs anyway, especially when throwing pitch accent into the mix.

I guess the main difference between Norwegian and Swedish when it comes to this is that since their equivalent of our /ɕ/ is /ç/, they don't have to push their version of /ɧ/ that far back to make sure you can actually hear a difference between the two, so they end up with the environment deciding the exact pronunciation.

Comparing Norwegian to the Swedish dialects and accents from up north, where /ɧ/ is consistently [ʂ] and /ɕ/ is still [ɕ]. Most of Sweden is... a mess in comparison :twisted: Although, there are some Norwegian dialects that have started to merge /ʃ/ and /ç/ completely... Luckily I haven't heard of anything like that happening anywhere in Sweden, we only do it in positions when it has no bearing on the meaning anyway. And only in those accents/dialects where the pronunciation of /ɧ/ is the aforementioned mess.

Oh, and both Swedish and Norwegian have varieties where the division is between fricative and affricate rather than between different points of articulation. Like Standard Finland Swedish or the Norwegian dialect of Ålesund.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Meera » 2017-04-30, 22:20

I get confused between Hindi and Punjabi all the time. Sometimes I will try to speak in Punjabi and I will just automatically start speaking in Hindi. When I was learning the Gurumukhi script I would practice the script and then half way down accidentally go into Devanagari :P
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby eskandar » 2017-04-30, 22:24

Vlürch wrote:If it sounds like Turkish or Kazakh without vowel harmony, it's Uyghur.

You mean Uzbek. Uyghur does have vowel harmony.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby iamblu » 2017-04-30, 23:14

I happens to me just to vocabulary when speaking Italian. From family I first learned Venetian and Italian later, so I use some non-standard forms in Italian (e.g., laorar, Brasil and Talia instead of lavorare, Brasile and Italia), but this becomes less common each day.

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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby dEhiN » 2017-05-01, 3:59

iamblu wrote:It happens to me just to with vocabulary when speaking Italian. From my family I first learned Venetian and Italian later, so I use some non-standard forms in Italian (e.g., laorar, Brasil and Talia instead of lavorare, Brasile and Italia), but this becomes less common each day.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby księżycowy » 2017-05-01, 12:11

dEhiN wrote:
iamblu wrote:It happens to me just to with vocabulary when speaking Italian. From my family I first learned Venetian and Italian later, so I use some non-standard forms in Italian (e.g., laorar, Brasil and Talia instead of lavorare, Brasile and Italia), but this becomes less common each day.

I'd also put "from my family" after "Venetian and Italian". It sounds unnatural to me to front it. The only context I can think of where you'd say that (and only that) is in direct response to a question. "Who did you learn that from?" "From my family."

So: "I learned Venetian and Italian from my family, so I use [...]"
If you wanted to specific you learned Italian later, you'd most likely have to make a new sentence. Given the overall construct of the current sentence, I can't think of anyway to stick it in at the moment.

Also: "It only happens to me with [...]" Having "just" in that placement seems unnatural to me.

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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby dEhiN » 2017-05-02, 4:37

księżycowy wrote:
dEhiN wrote:
iamblu wrote:It happens to me just to with vocabulary when speaking Italian. From my family I first learned Venetian and Italian later, so I use some non-standard forms in Italian (e.g., laorar, Brasil and Talia instead of lavorare, Brasile and Italia), but this becomes less common each day.

I'd also put "from my family" after "Venetian and Italian". It sounds unnatural to me to front it. The only context I can think of where you'd say that (and only that) is in direct response to a question. "Who did you learn that from?" "From my family."

So: "I learned Venetian and Italian from my family, so I use [...]"
If you wanted to specific you learned Italian later, you'd most likely have to make a new sentence. Given the overall construct of the current sentence, I can't think of anyway to stick it in at the moment.

Also: "It only happens to me with [...]" Having "just" in that placement seems unnatural to me.

I understood iamblu's addition of "just" indicating that it only happens with vocabulary, and not with other parts of speech. But using "only" instead, for me, is synonymous with using "just".

I agree with you about moving "from my family" away from the beginning of the sentence; guess I just didn't catch it before. But I think you could edit your sentence to specify that Italian was learned later: "I initially learned Venetian, and then/later Italian, from my family, so I use ..."

I prefer the use of "then" but I would consider "later" to be an acceptable dialectal usage.
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